What's the best approach for a picture where the sky is blown out, and there is a lot of white trim in house photo. I tried Claras' technique for difficult selection, but was unable to separate the house from the sky. I also tried using the magic wand, but again portions of the house were selected. Any ideas?

Hi there

Maybe I am not understanding but why not make a pen path in the areas that do not have a contrasted edge.

Or

Use selective color... and select whites and add cyan and adjust magenta. Then use the mask to paint in where you want and use a few cloud brushes to finish off.

Butch

christo,

generally speaking, when someone says 'blown out' they are referring to an image or area of one where the rgb values are 255, 255, 255....all white. and, with that in mind, there is only one way to treat it, like Ro says, 'fake it!'.

how you fake it is another story. you could cut and paste something in, clone something in, draw it in with a brush, airbrush it in and so on. the method is up to you.

if you're trying to make a selection in this area, you'll have to somewhat fake that too. in paint shop pro i can just draw in an area to be my selection with 'edit selection'. i believe Photoshop does this also but i dont know the command. quick mask maybe? not sure. you could also use a freehand point to point selection or just freehand.

Without seeing the particular picture, it's hard to advise on which technique would work best.

As the others have already said, sounds like one where you're going to actually have to select it yourself rather than rely on automatic tools.

If it's possible for you to post the picture, I'm sure we can be a bit more specific.